In the foreword of her collection of tape-recorded interviews Autoritratto (1969) Carla Lonzi challenged her readers with the question: “If it had been possible to record what the artists used to say in their everyday conversations, would we still need to read Vasari’s Lives to find a contact with them?” Conjuring a technological anachronism, Lonzi exposed the very capacity of sound recording to redefine the separation between history and experience. Following her cue, in this paper Francesco Ventrella draws from a series of artist interviews, talking pictures, and other acoustic scenarios to explore how resonance can help us rethink the limits of representation in the discourse of art history.

Traditionally predicated as a visual field, art history entertains a queer relation with resonance. Resonance is an elusive concept in cultural theory, one which troubles the defined boundaries of identity with multiplicity and excess. It can inspire queer modes of documentation that counter the visual taxonomies of a discipline shaped by epistemic and colonial violence. Open to auras of transhistorical co-emergence and co-existence, fantasy and haunting, resonances in art history present us with a score to imagine multidirectional and multilinear possibilities to experience echoes between potential pasts and transformative futures.